English Austerity by Sandra Horn
Someone once said to
me, in that withering kind of way, ‘Oh,
Sandra, you do fall in love!’
 |
| Sandra Horn |
He didn’t
mean I was serial adulterer, perish the thought, but that I tend to have great
passions about various things.
It’s true! Discovering an artist, writer, place,
piece of music sets me off on a wild-eyed quest to find out more, revisit, bore
the pants off anyone who’ll listen to the latest enthusiastic outpourings –
have you HEARD Sans-Saens’ Introduction and rondo capriccioso?
Have you READ
Alice Oswald, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, etc. etc.
Have you BEEN TO that church in
Dorset with windows by Whistler?
Followed by rant rant rant until my listener’s
eyes glaze over and I realise I’ve done it again. Gone too far. It’s immature,
I know, but here I go again.
The English language!! The subtle, playful, rich,
amazing, various, musical, poetic, tricky, wonderful stuff we’ve all grown up
with. The puns, rhymes, rhythms, kennings, litotes, hyperboles, alliterations,
onomatopoeia – oh, the positively orgasmic delights of it! All those people out
there who don’t know their asses from their arses, their alternate from
alternative, distinct from distinctive, disinterested from not interested,
apostrophe-scatterers or ignorers, etc. don’t know what they’re missing.
And
what about that boffin from Oxford
who said spelling and punctuation don’t matter? Apoplexy! ‘Let’s all go back to
grunt-and-point, then, shall we?’ I yelled. But then, in a road-to-Damascus moment,
I saw the error of my ways..
Hallelujah! Now I’m
saved! I realise that I’ve been a heretic, a pedant, and I’d got it all wrong.
It’s extravagant, that’s what it is. It has no place in Austerity Britain, The
Big Society, We’re All in it Together, etc. We should forget all about that self-indulgent
stuff and in all humility, do exactly that - go back to grunt and point!
Think of the savings! We could close ALL
libraries for a start, and printing presses and bookshops. The school day would
be much shorter, as would theatrical performances. Conversations wouldn’t
intrude on the important business of -
er – whatever it is we are going to do when we’re not indulging ourselves
playing around with language. Not
writing, obviously. Oh.
Rant over. By the way,
I loved the ebook fest! How brilliantly clever it was! Huge thanks to all
concerned! Whoops, here I go again…
Comments
And then Julia's comment. Put together there is something truly profound. About communication. Which is one of languages great functions (though I'm dealing a lot in Scots and Scots/English and that debacle at the moment) Julia shows how one person's memory impacts upon another's and how in some small way we can all be connected and yes, possibly HELP each other simply by recounting and sharing our experiences. And sometimes we can do this through ficton. Which is what (for me) it's really all about) Thank you ladies, both, giving me something to perk me up (even through the horror of sadness) on a Sunday morning. The human spirit CAN be communicated - and better perhaps through language than through grunt and point! Write on.
But Sandra, just to be awkward - my middle name - can I say that punctuation and grammar are importany only as far as they make communication easier? - They're not, in themselves, important.
For instance, how would you feel about this punctuation? - 'I sha'n't. - He wo'n't."
Right or wrong?
I'm reading a book by Wilkie Collins at the moment - The Dead Secret - and that's how it's punctuated. If the apostrophe marks the missing letters, then it's more correct than our 'I shan't.'
Not that Sandra said any of this, of course. But it appears to be the morning for rants, so I thought I'd better join in! Go Sandra! (Or should I say: Your enthusiasm, and passionate dialectic, touches me in many and varied areas of my frontal cortex, if you'll forgive the possible (nay, indeed, probably) solecism, so i offer unqualified encouragement (as the actress said to the impotent bishop) to keep it up.)
I'll get me coat
,-)
(If you wonder what I'm on about, try disentangling academic German sentences into English, as I'm grappling with at the moment!)
I adore the enthusiasms of others (Rupert Thomson's wax sculptures in Secrecy, for example), and sometimes, it's even catching. But for a change, I'll leave everyone else to do the ranting.